Media Coverage: Digital Miscellanies Index

What needed media coverage?

The Digital Miscellanies Index (DMI), a three-year Leverhulme-funded project to create a freely available online database of the 1,000 poetic miscellanies published during the course of the eighteenth century.

Poetic miscellanies are vital to understanding the diversity of eighteenth-century literary culture, and this gargantuan project to produce the definitive index of miscellanies will be a vital resource to scholars across the world.

Why was media coverage important?

At a difficult time for funding of the humanities, it is good to showcase to the public what humanities research is and why it matters.

What was the role of the Press & Information Office?

At first glance, digitising lots of minor writings would seem uninteresting to a general audience, so the role was twofold: first to find newsworthy stories among the large project, and second to get those stories out into the media.

• Uncovering newsworthy stories through in-depth conversations with the researchers involved
• Writing and distributing a news release to targeted list
• Follow-up calls and direct contact with selected journalists
• Preparing images for media use
• Informal interview training before radio appearances by researchers
• Facilitating radio appearances through the press office ISDN line

Results for the research project/the academic

• Offer of free technological assistance from a software developer who heard radio interview about the project, which otherwise would have been outside the project budget
• Researchers asked to give range of talks and papers on the project as result of increased awareness about it from within the academic community
• Useful evidence of public engagement provided by the media coverage, which can be used in grant applications
• The project’s website hits rose from 8 hits on Monday, 31 January to 215 hits on Friday, 4 February, the day the embargo lifted on the story

Dr Abigail Williams of the English Faculty leads the Digital Miscellanies Project. She says: ‘This coverage has given an enormous boost to the DMI project. Engagement generates engagement. We have been asked to give a whole range of talks and papers because our work has become more prominent. On the back of this kind of public activity it is also much easier to apply for funding schemes which have an emphasis on public engagement/impact.

‘The coverage has shown the way in which apparently specialised areas of research can quite easily generate public interest when presented in the right way. At a time when media coverage of higher education is dominated by fees, it illuminates all the other things academics do beside teach.

‘It also cheers everyone up! Colleagues have said how delighted they are to see that the public are genuinely interested in the obscurer reaches of book history or eighteenth-century verse. The evidence of public interest in our research gave both the individual researchers and the project a big injection of confidence. The increased sense of momentum and visibility is invaluable on a long-term research project which will take years to generate its full findings.’

In their words

Press Officer Matt Pickles says: ‘Abigail first contacted me in August 2010 asking if I could help to publicise a grant she had recently been awarded for the Digital Miscellanies Index, or DMI.

‘I knew we’d have to find an angle that would appeal to the media - "project receives funding" would not be of interest - and after meeting Abigail it became clear that the DMI had turned up some fascinating items which could be packaged to appeal to the newspapers.

‘The first was a bawdy poem attributed to “John Milton”. While presumably not by Milton, the very fact that people were trying to damage his reputation in this way was enough to interest a wider audience.

‘More recently Dr Claudine van Hensbergen, a research assistant on the DMI, came across a set of pornographic poems hidden at the back of a volume of serious poetic miscellanies. Claudine suggested that the poems’ existence explained the bestselling status of the drier, more respectable volume.’

Abigail says: ‘My experience of this press work has been a revelation. I think that academics tend to underestimate how fascinating their research can be to the rest of the world – if it is presented in the right way. Working with the press office on these stories has made the interface between the worlds of research and the media much more transparent to me. I realised that media work wasn’t a mysterious dark art – it’s just like teaching, or writing, about learning to convey information in a clear and accessible way.

‘The press office was essential for me in this learning process – helping to shape the story and press release; anticipate questions; talk through what we could and couldn’t claim for the story. It was a collaborative effort and I enjoyed the team-work.’

Matt says: ‘I was a humanities student and then a journalist, so it’s a treat to work in a role where I can hear about scholarly work while also sniffing out the pithy story. This was a great example of that. I worked to get together packages for the media on the findings, and articles and radio interviews worldwide followed.’

Abigail says: ‘Matt was also important in providing support and encouragement – both in terms of initial enthusiasm for my work, and the hand-holding at the daunting prospect of live national radio. None of us had ever done any media work at all, but he encouraged us to believe that we could do it – and he was right!

‘The coverage created awareness of a project in its early stages and helped develop a sense of excitement about the project for the team.’

Why it worked

Matt says: ‘Both of the finds had key ingredients that would interest a large audience and therefore the media.

‘First, they represented new discoveries – this was the first time the poem’s impact on Milton’s reputation had been comprehensively explored, and Claudine is the first person to make the link between the success of a particular set of poetry and the secret poems tucked in the back.

‘Second, as everyone knows, sex sells! But as well as sex, these stories had human interest – think of the backstabbing and gossip surrounding Milton, or the insight into the lives of 18th-century readers with their tucked-away pornography.’

Abigail said: ‘It worked because Matt was initially able to see what might be engaging in our work – and with that new perspective, we could start to spot other areas of interest.’

Matt says: ‘Finding the story with Abigail and Claudine was step one. However, if this had led to lots of media coverage but nothing that promoted the scholarship behind the project, it would not have been a success – there would have been something in it for the media but nothing for Oxford.

‘So I tried to ensure the Digital Miscellanies Project as a whole was mentioned in each piece, with credit to the funder wherever possible. There were also scholarly points coming across that were accessible to a general audience, for example about the mix between "high" and "low" literature. That might get more people engaged with humanities research.

‘Finally, the uncovering of these interesting titbits was a prime illustration of exactly why it’s important to catalogue and digitise – for all to see – these disparate collections of minor writings.

‘So these individual finds, while only parts of the overall project, showed why the project – and indeed humanities – matters.’

Coverage received

Very many articles and radio appearances, both in the UK and internationally. A small selection of the coverage:
BBC News Online
The Guardian
The Independent
The Telegraph
The Times
Daily Mail
The Spectator
National Public Radio (USA)
The Australian
The Huffington Post